I've been super-busy ever since we got back from Dragon*Con, writing things that aren't Design Notes along with planning & coordinating upcoming releases, so as this has been somewhat of a trend over the past few months I thought we'd spice up the MQ Design Notes by including more of the team! Here's Practel, who along with Plasma Charge has been helping us with testing and Gremlins!

Hiya Mech Questers!

You may have noticed that the last MQ Design Notes post was a little while ago... and I’m here to help fix that! This is my first design notes of MANY more to come, and I will hopefully be doing rundowns of what each release will have each week! There’s a good chance a lot of you may not know me, so let me introduce myself. My name is Practel, I started playing Artix games in 2007, starting with DragonFable and MechQuest, then I later joined EpicDuel, AQWorlds, and HeroSmash. I’m currently a tester for 3 games, EpicDuel, MechQuest, and AQW. Along with being a tester, I’m also an in-game moderator for EpicDuel, and forum ArchKnight for the EpicDuel and MechQuest bugs boards! I’m going to be giving you a little info about our fantastic Dragon*Con 2012 experience this year (which I went to, along with Maegwyn, Korin, Artix, and the rest of the AE gang who were able to attend!)

What is Dragon*Con?

I’ve already written a really awesome Dragon*Con recap for EpicDuel, so I’m grabbing a snippet of info that I think sums up the 'Con pretty well and using it here!

“Every year about 50 Artix Entertainment staff and assistant staff travel from their secret undisclosed battle locations to Atlanta Georgia (an 8 hour bus ride) to attend Dragon*Con! Dragon*Con is the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe! Each year the convention attracts about 60 to 70 thousand people, and an awesome group of Artix Entertainment players! To see everything that the con has to offer is almost impossible, but those who are courageous enough to fight the “4 days with no sleep” boss can do it! The con offers something for anyone. There are panels about everything from making your own functional steampunk R2-D2, to meet-and-greets with some of the biggest names in TVs, Movies, Gaming and Books. There are thousands of people dressed up as their favorite characters, movie marathons, a sea of tables for table top games like Dungeons and Dragons, card games like Pokémon, Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh, board games like Risk, Settlers of Catan and King of Tokyo.”

The Parade!?!

Have you ever seen a several-mile-long parade with thousands (and I mean it) of people dressed up in the craziest, wackiest, coolest, most epic costumes ever? Well, there may be only one place where that happens (at least in my experience) - and that’s Dragon*Con! Each year, over 60,000 people come to this convention, and at least half (at least it appears that way) dress up in all sorts of costumes. Talk about Halloween early! This year, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Maegwyn (a long time, real life friend of mine) and watch the parade IN THE FRONT ROW! Along with hanging out with my Artix Entertainment buddies, I set out on a mission: Record the ENTIRE parade and panel, then upload it to YouTube so that the players can see it, and that’s exactly what I did! Think I was lying about the people dressing up? Go check out the video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNkNpVSQTfw&feature=plcp

MechQuest and moving forward

This year's AE panel was probably the most exciting panel we’ve had yet! There were well over 100 people attending, filling the enormous room - and everything ran so smoothly that we actually ran out of time even though this was also our longest timeslot and largest room to date! At the panel we announced something that I think many of you guys will be excited for: The Ending to MechQuest’s main storyline is going to be about the foretold “Reset”! Here you will experience what exactly happened on Planet Loreon, and why a world with Future-space-robot-killing-machines was 're-set' back to the medieval ages!

Some of you may have been (understandably) confused by some of the recent news and may even think that MechQuest is ending; just as Maegwyn announced at the panel, and as Artix has reiterated, I can also tell you this: MechQuest is NOT ending, and it will continue to have weekly releases as usual!

I am SUPER excited to be able to write Design Notes along with possibly blues, Vivi, Plasma Charge, Minar, and the rest of the MechQuest team.

As always, stay classy, Hero!

BattleOn!

Thanks so much, Practel - that was epic!

We're working on the revival of the Ghosthunter Mechas again this week, with a focus on the versions you can get by using the Doom Cell merge option - along with bringing you a Nova Gem version of the Sepulchure Mecha since the T-shirts have gone rare! We've got a very busy Fall schedule planned for you, jam-crammed with holidays and new content and an exciting new promo in the weeks to come! So stay tuned to the Design Notes for more info (to be updated more frequently, too), and thanks for playing MechQuest!